Ethereum DADA Creeps & Weirdos

Information

Created: 31 October 2017
Creator: Beatriz Helena Ramos
Blockchain: Ethereum

Description

The Collection That Tried to Fix the Art World

Thirty artists, 108 drawings, 16,600 digital editions, and an experiment in paying artists that began before the NFT market had worked out what it wanted to be.

In December 2017, art analyst Jason Bailey bought a digital drawing by an artist called Moxarra. He paid 0.0168730806870718 ETH, worth about US$11.83 at the time, for print number 44 of an edition of 200. He named it Arty the Artnome.

Buying it took a little effort. Bailey had to open a Coinbase account, install MetaMask and navigate a marketplace that was still unfamiliar to most people. The object he acquired was a particular edition of a digital image, recorded on Ethereum with an identifiable owner and a history of transactions. Anyone could copy the picture, but a copy would not become print number 44.

There was another detail that made the purchase unusual. If Bailey later sold the drawing at a profit, the system was designed to distribute part of that profit to the artist and DADA, the community from which the work had emerged.

The drawing belonged to Creeps & Weirdos, a collection launched by DADA on Halloween in 2017. CryptoKitties was still a month away, the ERC-721 standard had not been finalised, and NFTs had yet to become a familiar part of internet culture. A small group of artists, developers and collectors was still working out how digital ownership might function. DADA had gone a step further and was asking what should happen to the money when the artwork changed hands.

The collection brought together 108 drawings by 30 artists who had been making art on DADA's collaborative drawing platform. Its creators borrowed ideas from early crypto collectibles but wanted to do something different with them: sell handmade digital art, establish verifiable editions and direct some of the proceeds back to the people who had created the work.

Over the next four years, Creeps & Weirdos would be retired, rediscovered during the NFT boom, and rescued from automated buyers that could have swept up the collection at its original prices. Its revival produced two versions of the same artworks, a major purchase by the NFT fund Metapurse and, eventually, a wedding between a Creep and a Weirdo in New York.

It began with a much simpler idea: people should be able to make art together without having to turn themselves into salespeople.

A website where people answered drawings with drawings

Creeps & Weirdos grew out of DADA, a platform conceived by Venezuelan-born artist and entrepreneur Beatriz Helena Ramos, usually known as Bea. The founding date varies between accounts. Some trace the project to 2012, when Ramos entered the Founder Institute start-up incubator; DADA's platform and other profiles commonly date its beginnings to 2014. Co-founders Yehudit, known as Judy Mam, and Abraham Milano joined the effort.

The idea was to let people communicate through drawings rather than words. Using DADA's online drawing tools, one person could make an image and another could respond with a drawing of their own. Others joined in, building conversations that sometimes continued through many contributions. The resulting works belonged to a chain of exchanges rather than to a single artist working in isolation.

Mam compared the process to an exquisite corpse in reverse. In the traditional surrealist game, participants contribute to a shared creation, often without knowing what the whole thing will become. On DADA, they could see the earlier drawings and respond to them, but the conversation still developed through improvisation.

The name referred to the Dadaist movement of the early twentieth century, which rejected conventional ideas about art and challenged bourgeois respectability. Ramos connected the reference to the movement's centenary in 2016 and to her own dissatisfaction with the assumptions of late capitalism. She wanted a place where people could make things together without worrying about whether they were professional artists or whether their work would sell.

The founders considered familiar business models, including charging artists to use the platform or selling advertising. They rejected both because they believed that putting a price on participation or filling the space with commercial messages would spoil its spontaneity. DADA remained free and largely uncensored, although this made the business difficult to explain to investors.

By October 2017, the platform reported more than 160,000 registered users and close to 100,000 drawings. Its community stretched across countries and professions. María García, a Venezuelan hairstylist and one of DADA's most prolific artists, was among its contributors. Others included farmers, technologists, researchers and collectors. Many of the people whose work would become part of Creeps & Weirdos had been active on the platform since 2014 or 2015.

The drawings selected for the collection were made between 2014 and 2017. They had not originally been created as NFTs or even as a single body of work for sale. They were contributions to an existing community of visual conversations. DADA's challenge was to find a way to give these works an independent record of ownership without turning the entire platform into a shop.

Pepes, Punks and a very unusual contract

In 2017, blockchain offered a possible solution. It could record who owned a particular digital edition and preserve a public history of its transfers, even when the image itself could be copied endlessly.

Other projects were already exploring the idea. Rare Pepes had turned internet meme imagery into collectible digital assets on Counterparty, a system built on Bitcoin. In June 2017, Larva Labs released CryptoPunks on Ethereum, offering 10,000 pixel-art characters with fixed supplies and different levels of scarcity. Collectors were beginning to treat digital objects as things that could be owned and traded, even when their appearance could be reproduced with a screenshot.

DADA saw an opportunity to adapt these ideas to handmade art. Instead of adding a shopping button to every drawing on the platform, the team would select works from its visual conversations and sell them in limited editions through a dedicated marketplace on Ethereum.

Ramos had already set out her argument in a Bitcoin Magazine article published on 21 September 2017, explaining how blockchain might help struggling artists around the world. The launch was approaching, and the team was experimenting at a time when the field was small enough for people working on different projects to contact one another and compare notes.

DADA approached Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs for permission to adapt the CryptoPunks smart contract. They agreed. DADA's developers modified the code to support individual drawings, limited editions and a system for distributing resale revenue. One small trace of the original code remains in the verified source: a comment in the transfer function still contains the word "punk".

The contract was deployed on 5 October 2017, and the collection was publicly launched on 31 October, Halloween. A preview published by The Sociable on 27 October announced 100 drawings, but the finished collection contained 108. The different dates found in historical accounts refer to different events: the deployment of the contract and the public release.

Creeps & Weirdos combined the collectible structure of CryptoPunks with the irreverent, sometimes grotesque aesthetic associated with Rare Pepes. But DADA was clear about what it was selling. These were not trading cards, memes, avatars or items from a game. They were drawings made by artists on the platform, offered as digital collectibles.

The collection contained 108 distinct images by 30 artists. Most of the contributors were from Latin America or of Latin American origin, although the DADA community was international. Their styles varied, from odd cartoon faces and strange creatures to unsettling figures and surreal compositions. Among the works later singled out in accounts of the collection were Cromomaniaco's The Weirdo, Massel's Adentro / Inside and Moxarra's Feel Good Creeps.

The artists were Adriana López, Beatriz Helena Ramos, Betunski, Boris Toledo, Boris Z. Simunich, Brian Mosch, Carlos Márquez, Cromomaniaco, DADA, Erick Sánchez, Franklin Piragauta, Gastón Spur, Hernán Cacciatore, Javier Errecarte, Jonathan Duarte, Lorena Pinasco, María García, Massel, Mauricio Rodríguez, Moxarra González, Norma Xelda Jara, Otro Captore, Raúl Ávila, Salvador Núñez, Sebastián García, Serste, Talita Sotomayor, Thana, Thaumatropio and Vanesa Stati. Several used additional artist names or pseudonyms, including J'erre, Susana Riveros, Serena Stelitano and Roxana Arrazola.

Rarity measured the conversations behind the drawings

The 2017 collection contained 16,600 digital editions divided into five scarcity levels: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare and Extremely Rare. The number of editions available for each drawing depended on its category.

Rarity	No of drawings	Editions per drawing	Total editions
Extremely Rare	5	10	50
Very Rare	10	70	700
Rare	15	100	1,500
Uncommon	25	150	3,750
Common	53	200	10,600
Total	108		16,600

What determined the category was not simply a judgement of artistic quality. DADA based rarity on the significance and length of the visual conversation to which a drawing belonged. A work with only a couple of replies might be Common, while one from a long, cohesive conversation could be Extremely Rare. The scarcity system therefore reflected something about the artwork's history, not just an arbitrary decision about how many copies to sell.

Four of the five Extremely Rare works were drawn by Bea herself. The fifth was by Otro Captore, the artist name used by Susana Riveros. At the other end of the scale, three Common drawings credited to DADA itself could be claimed for free.

Prices varied by rarity. An Extremely Rare edition initially cost the equivalent of about US$250 in Ether, while Common works were available for much less. Bailey's purchase of Moxarra's print for about US$11.83 provides a contemporary example of what a collector might pay.

The project also preserved unusually detailed information about the images. Most were PNG files measuring 2048 by 1536 pixels, while four earlier drawings were smaller, at 640 by 480. The contract stored a SHA-256 checksum for each image, a kind of digital fingerprint that can help establish whether a file matches the one recorded in the metadata. The records included the drawing's identifier, its edition size, initial price, artist identifier and checksum. Transactions shortly after deployment recorded metadata for all 108 artworks.

DADA published the smart contract and its metadata in a public GitHub repository, giving later researchers a way to inspect the collection's structure rather than relying only on descriptions written after the NFT market had taken off.

The repository also contains a small puzzle. One drawing by María García, Estefi, Enigma, has a checksum that cannot be matched to the exact image file that appears to have generated it. DADA's best explanation is that the original file was overwritten by another version with identical visible pixels but different timestamp information embedded in the file. The team suggested, with suitable Halloween humour, that the artist might have been playing a joke on blockchain provenance. That remains speculation, however; the exact file behind the original checksum has not been located.

How an ERC-20 token became a unique print

The technical design of the original Creeps is unusual by today's standards. They were issued using a modified version of ERC-20, Ethereum's standard for interchangeable tokens. In an ordinary ERC-20 system, one unit is equivalent to another unit of the same token. There is no meaningful distinction between individual units.

A digital artwork edition poses a different problem. If 200 editions of a drawing exist, a collector needs to be able to identify the particular edition they own. The image may be the same, but the ownership record should distinguish one print from another.

DADA added a unique PrintIndex to each edition. These indices were assigned randomly within the range for a particular drawing rather than simply counting upwards in the order of purchase. A transfer required both the drawing's ID and the specific print index, allowing the contract to identify the individual edition.

The tokens therefore behaved as non-fungible editions, even though they used a modified ERC-20 contract. They were not standard ERC-721 NFTs. That standard was still being developed in 2017 and had not been finalised when Creeps & Weirdos launched.

The distinction became more than a technical footnote a few years later. Marketplaces built for ERC-721 tokens could not automatically handle the custom transfer system used by the original Creeps. The very design that gave each edition an identifiable history also made the collection awkward to trade through newer marketplace infrastructure.

The original contract is publicly verifiable on Ethereum at 0x068696a3cf3c4676b65f1c9975dd094260109d02. Its code links individual prints to drawings, identifies editions and records the rules under which transactions should take place.

But the most unusual part of those rules concerned money.

The artist's share of a resale

In the conventional art market, an artist might be paid when a gallery first sold a work. If a collector later sold it for a much higher price, the artist would generally receive nothing from that resale unless a separate arrangement applied. The work might become much more valuable, but the person who created it would not automatically share in the gain.

DADA wanted the smart contract to change that relationship. Instead of relying on a buyer, seller or marketplace to remember the artist, the contract was designed to distribute money according to rules built into the transaction.

The arrangement differed between the first sale and a resale. In his December 2017 article, Bailey reported that 70% of the initial sale revenue went to the artist and 30% to DADA. On a profitable resale, the collector selling the work retained 60% of the profit, the artist received 30%, and DADA's community fund received 10%.

Take a simplified example. A collector buys a print for $10 and later sells it for $30. The profit is $20. Under the reported arrangement, the seller recovers the original $10 and keeps $12, or 60% of the profit. The artist receives $6 and the community fund receives $2. The artist benefits when the work appreciates, while the seller retains the original purchase cost.

DADA's later accounts sometimes summarised this as a 40% royalty on the seller's profit. The detailed split reported by Bailey explains how that 40% was divided: 30% to the artist and 10% to DADA. The distinction matters because this was not simply a 40% charge on the full resale price. The calculation applied to the gain.

DADA has described Creeps & Weirdos as the first NFT collection to code automatic artist royalties directly into a smart contract. The public code documents the mechanism, and the dates place it among the earliest artist-led Ethereum art marketplaces. An absolute claim to be the first in all NFT history requires caution, since earlier digital asset experiments existed on Bitcoin, Namecoin and Counterparty, and the answer depends on how "NFT" and "royalty" are defined. What the evidence clearly shows is that DADA built an on-chain resale payment system for artist-made digital art in 2017, before the standards and marketplaces of the later NFT industry were established.

Bailey's purchase of Arty the Artnome gave readers an early, practical look at how the arrangement worked. His article, The Blockchain Art Market Is Here, explained how blockchain could record attribution, edition sizes, ownership, provenance and payments. He had bought a drawing because he liked it, and the transaction came with a mechanism intended to benefit the artist if the work later changed hands at a profit.

For DADA, scarcity was only part of the idea. The contract was also a way to alter who received the money generated by digital art.

Rare Art and the turn away from speculation

Creeps & Weirdos began attracting attention among people exploring crypto art. The Sociable previewed the project in October 2017, and Bailey's December article introduced it to a wider art audience. In January 2018, images from the collection became the official visual identity of the first Rare Art Festival, known as Rare AF, in New York.

The festival brought together projects experimenting with rare digital assets, including CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Rare Pepes, Spells of Genesis, DADA and others. It hosted what has been described as the first live auction of rare digital art, at which a Rare Pepe known as Homer Pepe sold for US$39,000. Ramos later recalled the event as a moment when crypto art began to look like a movement, although she also saw it as a point at which speculation began to take hold.

DADA's founders spoke at Rare AF and the Ethereal Summit, and later at MIT, NYU, SXSW and a blockchain-art conference at Christie's in London in 2018. They argued that blockchain could help artists retain attribution and share in the value of their work. Yet the atmosphere around crypto art was changing quickly. Collectors were becoming increasingly interested in prices and potential returns, and DADA's team worried that the market was beginning to dictate the terms of artistic activity.

In 2018, the founders decided not to launch more NFT collections or continue operating their marketplace in the same way. It was a deliberate pause, not simply a technical failure. They wanted to reconsider the economics before pushing the platform further into a market they felt could overwhelm the creative community that had produced the art. From 2018 onwards, drawings made on DADA were sent to IPFS, a distributed file-storage system, rather than being immediately issued as new collectible tokens.

The crypto downturn of 2018–2019 made the change easier to understand. Interest in the market faded, and the exuberance that had surrounded early crypto-art events disappeared. Judy Mam later recalled the contrast between the bullish atmosphere at the 2018 Ethereal Summit and the much bleaker mood of the 2019 gathering.

In early 2019, DADA upgraded Creeps & Weirdos to ERC-721 through a new contract. The team also reduced the edition supply by roughly half, paused the original contract and distributed new ERC-721 tokens to holders of the 2017 editions. The original tokens became known as Creeps; the newer ones were called Weirdos.

The published count of Weirdos is inconsistent. Some DADA materials state 8,300, while the FAQ gives 8,500. The 8,300 figure is exactly half the original supply of 16,600 and appears in DADA's historical comparison, while 8,500 appears in other official material. The sources agree on the intention to halve the supply but do not give one entirely consistent total.

The images were the same, but the tokens and their histories were different. The 2017 Creeps preserved the original modified ERC-20 experiment. The 2019 Weirdos represented the attempt to move the collection to ERC-721, which was becoming the more familiar structure for individually identifiable NFTs.

Almost nobody bought the new edition at the time. Mam later said that only three collectors purchased the 2019 tokens, including DADA itself. The collection then remained dormant for about two years while the team worked on its economic ideas.

One result was DADA's Invisible Economy, presented in a white paper at the RadicalxChange conference in June 2020. The proposal aimed to separate artistic creation from pressure to sell individual works. Instead, value generated by the community would be pooled and distributed more collectively, in a model resembling basic income. The Creeps & Weirdos experience had influenced this thinking: its original contract had already directed a share of resale profit to a community fund rather than leaving the seller with all the gain.

The Apestorm

In early 2021, NFTs returned to the public eye on a much larger scale. Collectors began looking back through Ethereum's history for projects that had existed before the market boom. Creeps & Weirdos was among those rediscovered.

In March, a group of NFT "archaeologists" found an old, non-public link to the dormant collection and began buying the Weirdos. DADA called the rush the Apestorm. Hundreds of people suddenly took an interest in a collection that had been largely forgotten for two years.

Buying and reselling the works was not straightforward. The original Creeps used a custom ERC-20 contract, while the Weirdos were issued through an ERC-721 contract that required whitelisting. Major marketplaces did not readily support the collection's special transfer and royalty arrangements, so many transactions took place over the counter, directly between collectors.

DADA spent about five months looking for a way to restore access without erasing the collection's history. The simplest approach might have been to reactivate the old contract and burn the 2019 edition, but that would have removed the Weirdos and their separate provenance. The team decided to preserve both versions. Mam compared them to wine vintages: the same collection, but with different contracts and different histories.

The old Creeps presented another problem. Their original prices were still recorded in the contract. A Common edition that had cost only a few dollars in 2017 could be bought at that price if the market simply reopened. Automated bots could have swept up the supply before individual collectors had a chance to participate.

DADA devised what it called the Rescue Operation. The team built its own bots and used rescue contracts to buy back the collection from itself before making it available again. The aim was to give artists, community members and individual collectors a chance to acquire the works rather than allowing bots and large buyers to take everything at the old prices. The operation required gas fees for more than 15,000 transactions, a substantial expense at Ethereum's 2021 fee levels.

Help came from Metapurse, the NFT fund financed by Metakovan and stewarded by Twobadour. Metapurse had already attracted attention for buying Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days for US$69 million earlier in 2021. On 30 September 2021, DADA announced that Metapurse had acquired a complete set of the 2017 Creeps for 500 ETH, plus a curated selection of works for another 105 ETH.

The purchase helped finance the rescue and its transaction costs. DADA then arranged the relaunch in stages to avoid gas wars and make the works available to a broader range of collectors. The public marketplace opened on 5 October 2021, the fourth anniversary of the original contract's deployment. By the time of the announcement, DADA reported total sales of more than 1,000 ETH.

The proceeds were earmarked for the DADA Fund, intended to distribute basic income to contributing artists and developers. Resale royalties were set at 40% of the seller's profit, directed to the fund, and made optional. The arrangement reflected a compromise: DADA wanted to preserve its approach to paying creators while giving collectors a practical way to trade in a market that did not uniformly support the original contract's rules.

The collection made its first official public appearance after the revival at Metapurse's Dreamverse festival in New York on 4 November 2021. Some of the original artists attended, and the programme included a live drawing performance. The drawings had returned to public view, but the difficult questions about ownership, market access and artist compensation had followed them.

A wedding between two editions

Creeps & Weirdos appeared again in New York during NFT.NYC in June 2022. DADA organised street posters, Times Square screens, a float in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, a pop-up gallery in Manhattan's Meatpacking District and live artist installations. The events brought members of the community together and revisited the collection's unusual history.

The most theatrical event was a wedding between two digital artworks: Coy Catrina, a 2017 Creep, and Color War Weirdo, a 2019 Weirdo. The ceremony symbolically reunited the two editions of the collection, which shared their images but lived on different contracts. Colborn Bell, known in the crypto-art community as the High Priest of Crypto Art, officiated. Bailey of Artnome served as ring bearer, and musician Jonathan Mann composed a song for the occasion. Even a marriage between blockchain tokens had its wedding party.

The installations also addressed problems beyond the mechanics of NFTs. DADA's Embrace used layers of recycled materials collected around New York, with a surface resembling hair to represent the community's embrace. The Essence of Absence drew attention to members of DADA who could not travel because of immigration restrictions, the pandemic or bureaucracy. Their absence was represented through sound and interpretations of their work by artists who could attend.

Another installation, Prelude to the Market, took aim at the pressures of the NFT economy: status display, self-promotion and competition for collectors' attention. The events brought the project's central tension back into view. Blockchain could help distribute money to artists, but it could also reproduce the market pressures DADA had hoped to avoid.

There were tangible benefits for some of the artists. Many had not heard of blockchain when their drawings were issued in 2017. During the 2021 boom, some received substantial payments through the revived collection and their wider crypto-art work. María García, who also sold work on marketplaces such as Rarible, was among them.

García's story is sometimes told as an example of life-changing NFT income. She had been working as a hairstylist in Cumaná, Venezuela, and living with her mother at the car wash where she worked. Her art sales, gains in Ethereum and support from the wider community helped her eventually buy a house for herself and her mother. The outcome should not be credited to a single Creeps & Weirdos royalty payment; it involved her broader activity in crypto art and the wider market. Still, it gives a concrete sense of why DADA's concern with artist economics mattered to the people involved.

Other contributors continued to make art on DADA without becoming part of the NFT market at all. Ramos has said that some community members earned more from their creative work over three or four years than they had in their previous lives, without having to promote themselves constantly. For many artists, participation in the drawing community remained the point, regardless of whether any particular token rose in value.

In 2026, Creeps & Weirdos appeared in Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon, an exhibition curated by Georg Bak for ArtMeta during Art Basel Switzerland and presented as part of the Zero 10 digital-art initiative. The exhibition considered several decades of digital art, from early electronic images and computer graphics to contemporary AI and blockchain-based work. Creeps & Weirdos appeared in the PROTOCOL chapter, which examined smart contracts, provenance, royalties and digital ownership as parts of an artwork's history.

What remains of Creeps & Weirdos?

The two editions remain technically distinct. The 2017 Creeps are associated with the original modified ERC-20 contract and a supply of 16,600 editions. The 2019 Weirdos use ERC-721 and a reduced supply, generally described as roughly half the original total, although DADA's published figures differ. The 2017 works are available through DADA's own marketplace. The 2019 edition has largely depended on over-the-counter transactions, with limited OpenSea support for certain works, including Faceless Woman and Cyberwar.

DADA also developed a wrapper intended to make historic collections tradable through OpenSea. Wrapping provides a marketplace-compatible representation of an underlying asset, allowing an older token format to be used in a newer marketplace environment. It does not make the original contract disappear, and marketplace compatibility is not the same as enforcing the original royalty rules. The distinction is part of the collection's history: the contract could record a payment arrangement, but the wider trading infrastructure still had to support it.

Creeps & Weirdos is often described as one of the earliest artist-made NFT collections on Ethereum, and DADA claims it was the first to implement automatic on-chain royalties. Such "first" claims need care. Experiments involving scarce digital assets existed before Ethereum, including projects on Bitcoin, Namecoin and Counterparty, and Rare Pepes were already circulating before the Creeps launched. What the public record establishes is that DADA combined artwork created by an existing artist community, uniquely indexed editions in a modified ERC-20 system and programmed resale-profit distribution in a collection released in 2017.

The project also left a detailed trail for historians to follow: the drawings and their metadata, the contract code, edition numbers, prices and a record of the decisions made when the collection was revived. Its history illustrates the practical problems that appear when an experimental token system meets a much larger market. The custom contract made the editions identifiable but complicated marketplace access; the ERC-721 upgrade created a second edition; and the 2021 rescue required significant money and engineering work to preserve both versions.

DADA's later experiments with the Invisible Economy grew out of those experiences. The question was no longer just whether a digital drawing could be scarce or sold. It was whether the community that made the work could share in the value it created without becoming entirely dependent on speculation.

Creeps & Weirdos did not solve that problem. Its history is more interesting than a tidy success story. A group of artists began by drawing together; DADA turned selected conversations into collectible editions; the contract attempted to pay creators when their work was resold; and a later market boom forced the team to work out how to bring the collection back without erasing its past.

The Creeps and Weirdos still share the same images, but not the same tokens or histories. That odd double existence is a record of the choices made along the way, from the first modified smart contract to the later ERC-721 migration and the rescue operation. The collection's strangest feature may be that it kept changing while the drawings themselves remained the same.

Further reading

• DADA's Creeps & Weirdos website and FAQ — collection information, edition counts and the rescue operation.

• DADA's smart-contract repository — the original code, metadata and scarcity categories.

• Judy Mam, A Brief History of the Creeps & Weirdos — the collection's development, retirement and 2021 revival.

• Jason Bailey, The Blockchain Art Market Is Here — contemporary reporting on the collection and the purchase of Arty the Artnome.

• Beatriz Helena Ramos, Beyond Resale Royalties — DADA's royalty model and its later thinking about artist economics.

• DADA, The Creeps & Weirdos Wedding — the NFT.NYC events and symbolic wedding between the two editions.

• Right Click Save, From Code to Canon — the 2026 exhibition and its account of digital art's history.